América

T.C. Boyle is one of my favorite American writers. Brilliant style and in this case he captured perfectly a very present problem for the rich countries and especially for the US: illegal immigration in the context of individual lives. It is much more illustrative than the abstract numbers. The novel makes the gap between that abstract, impersonal and specific personal a central topic. The lives of two couples are constantly crossed. One one side, illegal Mexican immigrants, literally struggling to survive (this is not a metaphor, it is about their pure physical survival). On the other side, an American upper-middle class family living in a privileged neighborhood in the outskirts of Los Angeles. That plot sounds very simplistic and prone to cheap prejudices. Don’t worry, this is T.C. Boyle.
The lives of the two couples touch each other, both have impact on the other’s life. Sometime even dramatic, life-threatening impact. Nevertheless, they never get to know each other. Only snapshots, both draw weird conclusions in their respective imagination, which is totally determined by their own limited reality. But this is exactly the strength of the book, the same facts are interpreted from two different perspectives and you feel compassion with both.
It even touches the very problematic ethical question, if the poor have the right to destroy nature to satisfy their immediate basic needs: hunger. At the same time destroying the basis for future life.
For me, this book is one of the most intelligent comments on the globalization of the poverty. Only questions, no answers.